Donald Glover is a multifaceted artist who has reached success primarily as a writer, actor, comedian and musician. He first gained attention starring in YouTube videos with the internet sketch comedy group Derrick Comedy while studying dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (the videos have since reached over 100 million views)250. His work caught the eye of producer Tina Fey, who offered him a
writing gig on her new series 30 Rock soon after he graduated in 2006.251 Glover found
success as a writer for the series and earned a Writers Guild of America Award for his work.252 He left the show after three seasons and moved to LA in 2009. Show-runner Dan
Harmon was impressed by Glover after seeing the feature-length Derrick Comedy film
Mystery Team (2009) and cast him to play Troy Barnes in NBC’s new sitcom
Community.253 Shortly after Community began, Glover also had a successful stand-up
special on Comedy Central Presents in 2010 and was awarded the Rising Comedy Award
250 YouTube, “Derrick Comedy: About Page,” https://www.youtube.com/user/derrickcomedy/about 251 The Village Voice, “Donald Glover is More Talented Than You” (Apr 13 2011),
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/donald-glover-is-more-talented-than-you-6430538.
252 Writers Guild of America, “2009 Writers Guild Awards Television, Radio, News, Promotional Writing, and Graphic Animation Nominees Announced” (Dec 8 2008),
http://wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=3410.
253 The New York Times, “His Day Job Subsidizes All That Other Stuff” (Mar 10 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/arts/television/14glover.html.
at Just For Laughs Festival the same year.254
Meanwhile, ever since his days at NYU, Glover had been creating music.
Glover’s earliest known work is the album The Younger I Get that he produced between 2004-05 and handed out as CD-Rs to residents in the NYU dorm where he was an RA.255
He successively produced ten remix albums under the self-reflexive name mc DJ, and he produced three mixtapes, an EP, and two independent albums as Childish Gambino before his first official release in 2011.256 All of these works were released for free online.
While working on Community, Gloverstartedcollaborating with the show’s music composer, Ludwig Göransson, and began maturing his sound. The two have since worked together on subsequent Childish Gambino releases. Glover released his first official Childish Gambino album Camp (2011) with Glassnote Records. Camp is a concept album that tells the story of a boy at summer camp and the various trials and tribulations he faces. Glover toured the album extensively and effectively launched his music career as Childish Gambino. Nearing the fifth season of Community, Glover made the conscious decision to quit the show in early 2013in order to spend more time on his own projects.257
This rise to fame sharply diverges from more traditional narratives of hip-hop careers. Murray Forman writes in The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in
Rap and Hip-Hop:
Within hip-hop culture, artists and cultural workers have emerged as sophisticated chroniclers of the disparate skirmishes in contemporary American cities,
observing and narrating the spatially oriented conditions of existence that influence and shape this decidedly urban music…as hip-hop’s varied artists and aficionados themselves frequently suggest, their narrative descriptions of urban
254 Access Hollywood, “Aziz Ansari & Donald Glover To Be Honored In Montreal” (Jun 23 2010), http://www.accesshollywood.com/articles/aziz-ansari-donald-glover-to-be-honored-in-montreal-87055/. 255 Popular Opinions with Chaz Kangas, “Childish Gambino - ‘The Younger I Get’” (Nov 11 2011),
https://popularopinions.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/gambino2/.
256 ForeverChildish.com, “childish gambino discography and downloads,” http://foreverchildish.com/music.
257 TV Line, “Donald Glover Reveals the Real Reason He Quit Community: ‘I Wanted To Be On My Own’” (Oct 15 2013), http://tvline.com/2013/10/15/donald-glover-leaving-community-why/.
conditions involve active attempts to express how individuals or communities in these locales live.258
Forman is concerned with the ways in which rappers discuss a physical and socio-
economic social space,“the hood,” in hip-hop. Glover’s class background and entry point into the music business as a TV star, writer and comedian disqualifies him from such a narrative. His debut album Camp wrestles thematically with his ownracial identity and his feelings as an outsider to hip-hop culture. In the opening track, “Outside,” the lyrics state, “I just wanna fit in but nobody was helping me out / They talking hood shit and I ain’t know what that was about.” Glover mentions his cousin in the song as a sort of antithesis, saying his cousin was “taken over” by the streets and raps to him, “The world sayin’ what you are because you’re young and black / Don’t believe ‘em.” According to one online exegesis, Glover is stating here, “The ‘world’ (current culture) is telling his cousin that because he’s ‘young and black’ he has to be in the streets doing hoodrat stuff.”259 Glover actively works against the stereotyped construction ofracialidentity that
he feels influences his cousin.
W. E. B. Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk of “double consciousness” as
the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”Double
consciousness is meant to embody one’s feeling of “two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”260 Glover consistently
displays signs of a double consciousness in his lyrics and states in an interview, “White people are a blank slate…we are not…As a black person I constantly have to know what people are assuming about me.”261 He deals with this specifically in lyrics that address
being perceived as an “Oreo,” a racial slur connoting being black on the outside but white
258 Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan: 2002), 8.
259 User macksaveli’s Rap Genius annotation, “Childish Gambino – ‘Outside’ Lyrics” (2012), http://genius.com/Childish-gambino-outside-lyrics.
260 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, Avenel, NJ: Gramercy Books, 1994), 2. 261 Medium, “The Racial Politics of Childish Gambino” (Dec 4 2014), https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-
on the inside. He raps, “No live shows because I can’t find sponsors/ For the only black guy at a Sufjan concert.”262 This is in reference to indie artist, Sufjan Stevens, whose
album. ,Illinois, Glover had previously remixed as mc DJ into Illin-Noise. Because of Sufjan Steven’s largely white indie rock fan base, Glover feels like an outsider at his concerts. In another line he says, “I won’t stop until they say ‘James Franco is the white Donald Glover’.”263 This is in reference to Glover’s multifaceted artistic identity being
recognized as a “black” version of James Franco, another TV actor who has spread into other artistic worlds. Franco has been recognized to “[enact] hysterical identification or a (con)fusion of the self with a diverse set of multimedia artistic progenitors and
contemporaries.”264 For instance, Franco played an artist-turned-murderer named
“Franco” on an entire season of General Hospital, and his role was conceived as a work of performance art. Glover is working in a similar conceptual performance art world with
Because the Internet, and recognizes that he is perceived as the “black” James Franco
rather than Franco being the “white” Donald Glover.
Glover jokingly refers to himself on the song “Backpackers” as “The only white rapper who’s allowed to say the N-word.”265 He is playing up the idea that he is seen as a
“white rapper” due to his career path and the lyrical content of his work. In a Rolling Stone interview video titled “Battle: Donald Glover vs. Childish Gambino”266 where he
cleverly interviews himself, Glover asks Childish Gambino to quote his favorite verse from another rapper. Gambino responds with a lyric from Eminem, the most successful whiterapper in hip-hop history. In some ways, Glover may feel that Childish Gambino follows more in the tradition of a white rapper like Eminem rather than black rappers like Jay Z or Tupac. This further differentiates Glover from the racial connotations of hip- hop’s traditional “the hood,” though at the same time Glover still feels like an outsider to
262 Childish Gambino, “Fire Fly,” Camp (2011), Glassnote Records.
263 Childish Gambino, “Hold You Down,” Camp (2011), Glassnote Records.
264 Dinah Elizabeth Holtzman, “Hysteria and the Multimedia Art of Lady Gaga and James Franco,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48: p 18.
265 Childish Gambino, “Backpackers,” Camp (2011), Glassnote Records.
266 Rolling Stone’s YouTube Channel, “Battle: Donald Glover vs. Childish Gambino” (Nov 7 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5MWyVAUbI0.
white culture. He raps how as a child, his mom was “Workin’ two jobs so I can get into that white school, and I hate it there / They all make fun of my clothes and wanna touch my hair.”267 This creates a conundrum wherein Glover is an outsider to white culture due
to the color of his skin, but also an outsider to black culture as a resulthis taste and education. He finds both sides constricting, rapping “And every black ‘you’re not black enough’ / Is a white ‘you’re all the same’” This lyric chides ignorance on both sides, suggesting a refusal of being pigeonholed either too white to be black or too black to be white. In one of his most clever and obscure lines, Glover raps, “So it’s 400 blows to these Truffaut niggas / Yeah, now that’s the line of the century / Niggas missed it, too busy, they lyin’ ‘bout penitentiary.”268 Here, he is effectively using his knowledge of
French New Wave cinema, a characteristically white European film movement, as a means to diss rappers he deems “true-faux niggas” that follow more stereotypical hip-hop narratives. Glover himself said, “no one is going to get that line,”269 and one could assume
that the rappers he is dissing may not be aware of Fancois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows since they did not go to film school. It is a clever example of Glover appropriating white
culture to further distance himself from black culture and ending up somewhere in- between these two worlds.
Kelly Isley says of The Isley Brothers’ struggle to reach FM rock formats in the 1970s, “I don’t think we would have any problem crossing over if the color of the skin was different. It’s not the color of the music.”270 The “color” of Childish Gambino’s
music may similarly appear to contradict the color of his skin. Many of Glover’s early works show a strong affinity for indie pop/rock rather than hip-hop, with Glover remixing albums from Sufjan Stevens and Fiona Apple as mc DJ. Early works of Childish
Gambino feature him rapping over songs from established indie rock acts like Animal
267 Childish Gambino, “Outside,” Camp (2011), Glassnote Records. 268 Childish Gambino, “That Power,” Camp (2011), Glassnote Records. 269 YouTube user xxbffcutestarxx, “YAYA LOVE!” (Sep 10 2011),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1X3z_iYa1k.
Collective, Sleigh Bells, and Grizzly Bear.271 It is then unsurprising that Glassnote
Records, a label known for indie rock acts like Mumford & Sons and Phoenix, signed Childish Gambino. Glover claims that he chose to sign with Glassnote to have an “indie push” for the release of Camp and stated that the album was “black rock” due to its use of real instruments.272 The term “black rock” relates to the Black Rock Coalition, a New
York-based artist’s collective founded in 1985 whose goal is “to assert that a new generation of black musicians could play more than just R&B and hip-hop.”273 This is
precisely what Glover is trying to do, and in the track “Hold You Down,” a song about the music industry holding rappers down, it ends with the line, “They ask me what I’m doin’, I say I’m stealin’ rock back.”274 This places Glover in a position where he is
appropriating white music that itself was built on appropriations of black music.
This creates an even further divide between Glover and hip-hop, though that does not stop his music from being classified as such. Pitchfork opens their scathing 1.6/10 review of Camp with “If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I’m guessing it’ll be
Camp”275. This sarcastic statement emphasizes the fact that Childish Gambino’s fans are
typically not hip-hop connoisseurs, so if an indie rocker buys one hip-hop album it would be Camp. Furthermore, the statement is discrediting Gambino’s hip-hop bona fides.
Fittingly, Glover had already rapped “Pitchfork only likes rappers who crazy or hood, man” on the album before this review was written. Childish Gambino’s music may seem hip-hop on the surface but arguably bears stronger ties to the indie pop/rock scene. Pierre Bourdieu writes of classification in relation to taste:
Taste is a practical mastery of distributions which makes it possible to sense or
271 Childish Gambino, I Am Just A Rapper (2010), Self-released.
272 Sunset in the Rearview: Music Blog for Hipsters and Squares, “Childish Gambino Signs to Glassnote Records” (23 Aug 2011), http://sunsetintherearview.com/childish-gambino-signs-to-glassnote-records/. 273 SPIN, “Black Rock: An Oral History” (Oct 23 2008), http://www.spin.com/2008/10/black-rock-oral-
history/.
274 Childish Gambino, “Hold You Down,” Camp (2011), Glassnote Records.
275 Pitchfork, “Childish Gambino - Camp” (Dec 2 2011), http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16074- camp/.
intuit what is likely (or unlikely) to befall — and therefore to befit — an individual occupying a given position in social space. It functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place’, guiding the occupants of a given place in social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position. It implies a practical anticipation of what the social meaning and value of the chosen practice or thing will probably be, given their distribution in social space and the practical knowledge the other agents have of the correspondence between goods and groups.276
Bourdieu is discussing the expectation that comes with anticipating certain values
associated with particular tastes, which here can be applied to perceptions of hip-hop and indie rock. When Childish Gambino is viewed through a hip-hop lens, the music is seen as a joke to hip-hop purists because it does not fulfill their expectations. However, when viewed through an indie rock lens, confusion sets in simply because Glover is both black and raps.His background, influences, and record label relationship all point towards the indie rock scene, but Glover still consistently struggles with being classified as hip-hop. On a more fundamental level, these genre labels are built on divisions between black and white music. Sarah Sahim writes in her Pitchfork article “The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie”:
In indie rock, white is the norm. While indie rock and the DIY underground, historically, have been proud to disassociate themselves from popular culture, there is no divorcing a predominantly white scene from systemic ideals ingrained in white Western culture. That status quo creates a barrier in terms of both the sanctioned participation of artists of color and the amount of respect afforded them, all of which sets people of color up to forever be seen as interlopers and outsiders.
This touches on views of Glover that classify him as an outsider to indie music as a consequence of not being white. Considering Glover is an outsider to hip-hop as well, this only furthers the classification purgatory in which his music exists. A response to Sahim’s article on New Republic states, “There are few artists of color in the indie scene because artists of color who make what could be called ‘indie music’ get classified as
276 Pierre Bourdieu, “Conclusion,” Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984), 466-484.
something else.”277 Despite Glover’s attempts at classifying his music as indie rather than
hip-hop, he and his music still fall under classifications that he does not agree with or desire. Glover finds technology as a large contributing factor to his success, and in his song “All the Shine,” he explicitly raps, “I got fame, my A&R’s a computer”278. Artists
and repertoire (A&R) is the division of a record label that manages, promotes, and generally oversees an artist’s every move, and Glover states here that he simply uses a computer for these purposes. He curates his own online social media profiles, uploads music and videos at whim, and handles various other aspects of his career online.
Glover’s online presence grew along with his television and comedic success, and his highly active social media presence and consistently updated website became strong aspects of his artistic identity. Fans could easily communicate with him on Twitter and Tumblr, and Glover used these platforms in a way that showed they were a part of his life. These online platforms arguably give Glover greater autonomy in curating his artistic image than he would have had in a pre-Internet era. If his A&R were controlled by the music industry, Glover would have fallen more fully into the streamlined and racialized rapper identities that he critiques. However, because [of] the internet, he is able to take control of his identity and create a complex image of an artist who bridges the gap between white and black cultures without being exclusively on one side or the other. As we will see with Because the Internet, Glover takes his feelings about the power of classification further in creating a text that seeks to resist textual classification altogether.